Wild Act 3
Posted: August 5, 2009 Filed under: Wild Act 9 Comments »Rie Takada – Tokyopop – 2003 – 10 volumes
Reading further into this series, while I still love the sense of humor and the characters, it’s getting harder not to notice the really common plot devices it relies on. I like the mechanics of it, but I kind of wish that both Yuniko’s parents weren’t legendary actors, along with her boyfriend, and the hokey feel-good situations between Yuniko and Ryu and Yuniko and her mother feel a little tired by the end of the volume. As much as I like the couple, there’s only so much support I can watch Ryu give in one volume.
On the other hand, I still like the little quips and jokes that go along with the hokey lines. Usually such jokes will come immediately before and after a cheesy love scene. I also have to admit I kind of like these love scenes, and I like the fact that Ryu and Yukino are such a happy and healthy couple. Their misunderstandings are brief and both are willing to forgive and forget in small matters, which makes this infinitely more readable than a lot of other things.
The bawdiness and sex jokes continue, with lots of dancing around thei issue without an actual consummation of the act. Again, I get a real kick out of this since it’s such a taboo subject in other shoujo manga. To see Yukino and Ryu discussing their (made-up) sex life with themselves and others is pretty comical and incredible in its own way, and it makes me wonder why the cavalier, yet responsible, attitude doesn’t appear in other series.
…Oooh, I see. It ran in Sho-Comi, which had those problems about the sexual content a few years back. Apparently Wild Act isn’t alone in its endeavors. And yikes, 25% of the magazine’s readership are 13-year-olds reading Mayu Shinjo?
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“And yikes, 25% of the magazine’s readership are 13-year-olds reading Mayu Shinjo?”
This doesn’t ruffle my feathers. I was reading some racy stuff myself when I was younger than that. I was not particularly interested in that sort of thing then, but it sometimes happened in books that I found engaging for other reasons.
I suppose the fear is that the young, impressionable girls will follow the example of their Sho-Comi heroines at a shockingly young age. I can’t say that never happens, but I suspect the correlation is weak, if it even exists. It certainly did not happen that way for me. In fact, I suspect that the lack of sheltering I had in that regard pushed me the other way. To this very day, I have not had my first kiss, and I am in no hurry about it.
It’s true that it probably doesn’t really influence young girls to jump into bed. There’s probably no more harm in it than there is a young crowd reading something violent. There’s nothing that can get me to believe that reading or watching anything will incite kids to violence, and it’s probably the same way with the sexually-oriented teen books since there’s a whole lot more thought that goes into sexual encounters than “well, I read this in a book and it looked sooooo hot!”
This type of issue in Gossip Girls-type teen fiction does bother me, though, less because of sexual promiscuity and more because the characters have terrible personalities and habits but are portrayed in such a way as to be admirable. That’s more in the “act in this way to be cool and have everyone love you” way more than the “sleep around with guys to be cool” way.
On the other hand, the fear may just be a product of my upbringing, too. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, so I wasn’t really reading anything like this until I graduated high school. I’m rather embarrassed to admit I thought sex was kissing with tongues until I was 16 and didn’t know what male genetalia looked like until I was 19.
Well, for a while, I simply did not know what was happening in those scenes, since they generally did not go into too much detail, and I didn’t have the ability to fill in the details. So I assumed nothing was happening. Then, when I re-read some of those books years later, I thought ‘wait, they were having sex, how did I miss that?!’ Even most shojo comics have enough discretion that I think the ignorant would simply not get it and move on (though I think it would be fine if 10-year-olds did understand what was going on). Rie Takada and Mayu Shinjo might stretch that.
I met Lois McMaster Bujold when I was 18. She also grew up in Ohio, though maybe she grew up on the opposite side of Ohio as you. I said to her “I’ve been a fan of your books for years”. She replied “You don’t look like you’re old enough to have been a fan for years”. Her books have quite a bit of sex, and even more violence, torture, and depression, so I could understand her shock. However, I don’t see her books that way because to me, they offer so much more.
Because I thought sex was kissing, I figured it was going on all the time when I watched a movie or read a book. I had no grasp of what the implications were until I was much older, and I would normally gloss over those types of plot points for lack of interest. But I guess I didn’t read a whole lot of things with any romantic content until I was much older, either. I suppose that worked out for the best, because I wouldn’t have really enjoyed it back then and probably would have sworn off a good deal of what I enjoy now.
It seems like Bujold grew up in Columbus, which I’m not all that familiar with (it’s in the center of the state, I grew up on the east side, about 3 hours away). I would guess it’s more liberal, but I’m pretty sure the city wasn’t all that large until recently, and probably was pretty conservative while Bujold was growing up. It’s probably conservative to this day, for that matter, with the possible exception of the Ohio State University crowd.
I recall that sex education was offered here in the 5th grade, every year of middle school, and as part of a ‘health ed’ class in high school. Even in the 5th grade, it was complete with diagrams. Only kids with parental permission were allowed to participate (except I think it was truly mandatory in high school), but most parents gave permission, and I don’t see how the kids who didn’t participate could stay in the dark for very long.
We had a “talk” in the 5th grade where they gathered all the girls together in the lunchroom and told us about our periods and all the practical knowledge we would need about that, but didn’t really explain the mechanics or the whys of it. We had a health class again in 10th grade, but the hows and whys of sex were not discussed. I’m not sure if that was because they weren’t allowed to talk about it or if it was because they thought we would know at that point. Mostly they covered abstinence, the horrors of teen pregnancy, how to say “no,” and what happens when you get certain STDs and things like that. My class might have been different too, since I opted for a short summer class in order to take something else during the school year, but I don’t think it was.
I encourage teenagers to not have sex until they are 18. However, people can’t exercise good judgment if they don’t have all the facts. I also find it insulting to teenagers that some people think the only way to get them to make a wise decision is to manipulate them through selective information and maintaining their ignorance. The California government was spot-on when they rejected the money which Washington gives to states that practice ‘abstinence-only’ education.
Of course, I encourage shojo heroines to do whatever I would find most entertaining, which might very well be having them hop into bed with an immature guy who gets her pregnant and can’t really support her, so she has to go into explosive character-growth mode.
I think for a lot of people, it’s not that they find sex education inappropriate, it’s just that they have a hard time discussing sex themselves, especially with teenagers. It can still be kind of a taboo, despite the general openness today. Of course, these people probably shouldn’t be designing a sex education curriculum, and I think there probably are still a lot of parents that do not want their children exposed to sex education before they feel they are “ready.” It is in the general best interest to arm teens with information and not just fictional stories in book/TV/movie/peer form, though.
Haha, but yes, I’m all about fictional teens acting irresponsibly. The more irresponsible and drama-tastic, the better. I especially like the ones that hop into bed, then go out and conquer kingdoms. I’m sure I’d feel different if I was a parent, but guilt-free and child-free readings are something I can safely say I am enjoying immensely.